Impact of Climate Change on Wine Tourism: An Approach through Social Media Data

Abstract

Wine tourism is one of the best opportunities for rural development, but because it is partially exposed to climatic conditions, it is a climate-vulnerable tourism activity. However, an understanding of the potential impacts of global climate change on this popular activity remains limited. This study proposes a new methodology that combines current daily gridded climate data from the E-OBS project with big spatiotemporal data from the Flickr photo-sharing platform through a generalized additive model This methodology was implemented to study the potential impacts on tourism flows due to climate change and to make predictions about the future using data from the CMIP5 project. We applied the methodology to 5 European wine tourism regions: Alsace (FR), Chianti (IT), La Rioja (SP), Langhe-Monferrato (IT), and Moselle (DE). Results show an increased probability of presence and increased deseasonalization of tourism in all study areas and an anticipation of peak presence from summer to spring in three of the five regions. We believe that these results can be useful for public and private stakeholders to adapt the offer of wine tourism services to changes in demand and to direct the organization of events such as festivals and thematic tours.

Perceiving and Adapting to Climate Change: Perspectives of Tuscan Wine-Producing Agritourism Owners

“…The agritourism owners had divergent views on whether climate change was going to be beneficial to their agritourism enterprises. The expansion of the previously summeronly season to all-year agritourism opening echoes the findings that the shoulder seasons are becoming holiday seasons [12,[43][44][45]. However, this is not an unmitigated success as the unpredictable weather leads to cancellations, in all seasons (R2).…”

“…Despite there now being a scientific consensus that the planet is warming [9], Fourment et al's [10] recent work exploring wine growers' perception of climate change still found scepticism on this topic. Notwithstanding this example of an unwillingness to face the truth, there is a broader swathe of research, dating back to at least 2005 [11] and up to the present day [12], exploring how climate change is affecting wine growing and its interrelated tourism. Climate change has been demonstrated to have an impact worldwide on winemakers [11], [13],…”

“…Studies have been carried out exploring the effects of climate change on rural and mountain tourism in Europe. These have demonstrated that what are described as 'shoulder seasons', ie: spring and autumn either have already, or will be, perceived as desirable periods for vacations [12,[43][44][45] and enable wineries to exploit their wine making and tasting facilities in the seasons when they are otherwise underused [12].…”

Associations between temperature variations and tourist arrivals: analysis based on Baidu Index of hot-spring tourism in 44 cities in China

“…GAMs provide more flexibility than GLMs, as the former relax the assumption of linearity while retaining coherent inference between the dependent and independent variables (Reiss 2006 ). Thus, GAMs are widely used in examining the associations between meteorological factors and tourism (Fotiadis et al 2021 ; Saenz-de-Miera and Rosselló 2014 ; Sottini et al 2021 ; Tiwari et al 2021 ; Yoon 2019 ) owing to their ability to describe static nonlinearities, i.e. nonlinear effects that are stable over time (Aldrin and Haff 2005 ).…”

Status of Coopetition in Wine Tourism Research

“…Some studies, such as Marlowe and Lee (2018), showed that the designations of the origin of wines are a joint representation directly related to the development's production, quality of the environment's geographical characteristics, and the local terroir. The set also contains destination image studies to generate rural development (Iatisin et al, 2018;Sottini et al, 2021) and studies on the sustainable use of natural resources by wineries and wine tourism (e.g., Martins et al, 2017;Serra-Cantallops et al, 2021;Sun & Drakeman, 2020). The research points out cooperation to achieve sustainable goals and create a wine tourism destination image, but also a coopetition for resources among the two industries, wine, and tourism.…”